The Future According to Literature

What with climate talks sounding scarier and scarier, it would be nice to know what's going to happen years in the future. Well, this chart might provide some clues, at least if you trust the predictive minds of its authors.

What with climate talks sounding scarier and scarier, it would be nice to know what's going to happen years in the future. Well, this chart might provide some clues, at least if you trust the predictive minds of its authors. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova explains that this infographic comes from Italian designer Giorgia Lupi, who based it off a piece published over at The Awl. Lupi first created the chart in Italian (some of it still lingers), developing an intense system of coding to explain not just when an event is supposed to happen, but what kind of event will occur and what its impact will be. See here:

So, for instance: The Hunger Games has a black bar to indicate that the impact of the event is negative, but H.G. Wells's The Time Machine has a red bar to indicate that the event is positive ("the world still exists"). We recommend clicking through since it's kind of hard to really understand the timeline without zooming in. The cluster of red bars way far in the future foretells something good possibly. But we'd have to get through a lot of negative events to get that far.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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